Regaining Balance
by rednightmare
Summary: When the wood nymph tears out Garrett's eye, his equilibrium and his world are thrown off-kilter. Artemus can help.


_**Author's Note**_**: This is a single piece, introspective, starring Artemus. Focused on Garrett, set during **_**The Dark Project**_**. **

**Out of all the unsaid tragedy and frustration in the **_**Thief**_** series, Artemus's persistent loyalty just rips me apart. Mostly because, having played **_**Deadly Shadows**_**, it's pretty clear Garrett will never be able to bring himself to a place where he can square with and reciprocate that care. I see Artemus as being the closest he's ever had to family, and I wanted to play around with that relationship – flesh it out into an estranged, quasi father-and-son dynamic. (That, and I was in a mood to write something sad.) **

**Slight liberties taken with this, as I like to think of **_**Thief**_** as a game that allows you to fill in the blanks as you please. The only real timeline tweak I've made is having him inducted a bit younger than the intro sketch suggests, but not by much (assuming that canon-Kid Garrett enters the Keepers at about 12-13ish). I don't believe the additions I've made are earth-shattering or irrevocable, storyline-obliterating atrocities. But it's really up to your personal taste, since we don't know much about his life during and prior to leaving the Order. **

**Thanks for reading!**

* * *

><p><strong>Regaining Balance<strong>

_The essence of balance is detachment. To embrace a cause, to grow fond or spiteful, is loss of balance – after which, no action can be trusted. Our burden is not for the dependant of spirit._

_- Mayar, Third Keeper_

* * *

><p>The hardest thing Artemus had ever done – and would continue to do throughout the murky course of his life – was watch Garrett fall.<p>

When the thief was a boy – nothing more – his quiet mentor had watched him put one foot through a rotted plank of training bridge and _plunge_ toward the courtyard stones below. He remembered well the crunch of bad wood; waiting for that sickly sound of small bones snapping on rock face; the way air rushed in reverse down windpipe and into stomach. He remembered how quickly indifference to a student clambering about such heights turned into the odd, strangled pitch of his voice shouting for help; how easily Garrett's broken ankle could have been his neck; how both hands persisted to shake even after Isolde had applied healing runes and carried the child off to their infirmary. He remembered how the breath stuck there somewhere between his lungs, and he did not think to let it out until hours later.

On that day, Artemus learned what it was to be a parent.

When master found a jump his apprentice could not quite make – a danger adolescent Garrett did not hurtle himself over, haughty and indignant as was his brand these days – the instructor devised a different way to educate. _"You should never approach a drop with abandon," _he had said, watching the lad lose his nerve and skitter short on the edge of that rain-slick rooftop, indecision beneath a smoggy purple sky. Fog made the world feel heavy and slow. _"It is vital to first study it; to understand what it will demand of you. You cannot trust wet shingles not to give. But you can trust in your knowledge. Trust that your body has been taught what to do. And once you have assessed, calculated, imagined it from every angle… then abandon is the only way to leap."_ Cryptic hints, as usual… but ones that resonated somewhere within him. Grim-faced as the thief was, hood and dark hair dripping, he squared himself with those words and jumped. He cleared the gap by a handbreadth. On that day, Artemus learned vicarious triumph – what it is to feel a father's pride.

And on that precipitous day when their young acolyte, passionate and promising, shoved off his cowl and left the Order what now seems like decades ago, the old Keeper learned betrayal.

There were so many things about which he was _wrong_. Misplaced goals, insidious perfectionism, pervasive self-interest and the false beliefs that fate was a manmade ship… these were the qualities that sparked rebellion. It was premature, ill-founded, juvenile. It was the worst mistake a smart lad like this one could make with his future – the squandering of certainty to tangle into a fight he cannot win. It was selfish and short-sighted. It was moronic. So many sharp words Artemus could have said to such an almost-man, ego swimming in his nascent talents; so many heartfelt pieces of advice. And yet he watched in silence and let the thief's angry words filter through with no response. He watched the provocations made towards a dozen impatient trainers and arrogance vented upon fellow students. He watched as Garrett – so immature, so brazenly _sure_ of being unseen – crept from the dormitory one night, stole a coin purse from his master's room, then slipped out a glassless window… leaving only traces of shadow and the dust whorls in compact, focused, hateful bootprints.

He was so much better than all the rest. When others slammed their tomes shut in frustration, Garrett –who'd been illiterate when they'd found him on grimy dock streets – poured on. When his fellow initiates grew stringy and buckled, he would remain on a conditioning post, standing perfectly still for hours. He could vanish in a heartbeat and rematerialize in the worst or best places. He had no time for slackness or human foibles. Maybe that was part of his downfall – maybe it was just a convenient excuse, because Artemus could understand questioning the authority of "fate" better than he'd ever share with a boy.

He had not wanted to watch. He wanted to spring from his bed, nightrobes and all, slap the boy's face and spill all that malicious gold. _"Did you really think you could sneak about beneath my sight? Everything you know – everything that you believe makes you great – I have taught you,"_ he could have scolded for the insult of that treachery. He wanted to twist one of those large, red ears, shove him in a basement cell and triple-bolt the door. _"Do you not realize I will always know where you are? If this is the life you so prize, spoiled child, discover first what a real prison feels like,"_ he could have scalded, and left him there without light or sound for a week. He wanted – because he was younger, then, and stronger than this graying old sentinel he'd become – to lock both arms around his pupil, pin down the spiteful fists, hold him tightly there until something like sense trickled in. _"This is for your own good,"_ he could have said – could have been the disciplinarian, the guardian, the voice of wisdom and pulled him back. _"You may hate me now, but one day you'll see. You'll see that we are right about this; that our protection is the best place for you; that everything I have done was for your sake. And you will understand that when this has passed."_

_Watching_ was a Keeper's trade and their code, but doing so – taking quiet, neutral stock as Garrett struck out a radical course to ruin his own life – was the singular most difficult trial Artemus had faced. It was a trial that stretched throughout their years, and it never got easier… no matter how many times the thief set out to destroy himself.

And for all that – for the curled lips, toxic words, the spite from severed pupil to an advocate discarded – this wizening Keeper still remembered a small youngling who tied tunics backwards, lost tiny left shoes, misspelled _p-r-o-p-h-e-s-e-e_, and still chewed his cheek in the City dark.

Artemus always had many duties; he had never learned what it was to be needed until a child came into his life.

There was talk – as the lad must've known there would be – of Enforcers, who would cut their renegade down without hesitance or difficulty; Artemus argued against it in council. There was a ridiculous fight with that petty syndicate captain, Ramirez; Artemus relied on the knowledge he'd coached his student better than any moneyed thug. There was the headstrong breach of Cragscleft– a brass and cog place that, with one misplaced step, could have sneezed him out as tar; Artemus held his breath. And behind that half-cocked break-in there was – shortly after his Order defection – an unrealized attempt on the thief's behalf to ascribe new mentorship to Cutty, a man of no conscience or consequence, who would fail him surely as the material wealth Garrett believed (needed to believe) could free him. Artemus hoped he would someday learn to see.

Garrett was a creative soul – the Keeper had to grant him that, at least.

Time and time again, Artemus watched. He gave space. He let go. But he never stopped Garrett because it was not his right – and now, looking in the hollowed truth of what had come, Artemus could not decide if this calculated inaction was wisdom or weakness.

And so, knowing of his own choices, it was doubly painful to watch now: the thief lilting when he walks, tripping over smooth citadel floors, bleeding slowly through the matted wrap of bandages across his face.

When the Order discovered Garrett's latest folly – unearthed his entanglement with one eccentric man and a black-hearted woman who were more than their faces had shown – they responded with due haste. Artemus remembered how his pulse had raced moving through the weed-eaten hallways of the Trickster's manor. And he had forgotten entirely about Gadwall and Thorsen beside him when they broke a locked door and found the thief there… ash-pale, slick with blood, crumpled delirious under an unnatural knot of vines. They had cut him free with pocket knives. Garrett woke screaming – horrible, watery, madcap nonsense spat between gasps – and nearly stuck a dagger into Artemus's underarm before he recognized a familiar tattoo, weak chin and hoary gaze. He grabbed a hold of the Keeper's cowl and wrinkled it fiercely. He gibbered something inaudible about witches and shook. And he fainted, terror dissolving all his pretty grudges, and the old master clutched his fallen charge much like he had after that courtyard tumble many years ago.

And when he took the boy's face in his hands, wiped away gore with a robe sleeve, and stared pallid at the cavernous socket – Artemus learned dismay.

It was not his fault, what happened to Garrett that damp night in the City's arm. This much was clear – regardless of what emotions swollen, scarred flesh and black lids elicited beneath the low light of citadel corridors. So the Keeper was not sure why he felt a need to apologize. Perhaps it was resurfacing guilt, sloughing off like a scab. Perhaps it was because in lieu of any comforts, Artemus held a torn fistful of cape to the thief's wounds as they picked him up from Constantine's floor. _"Since you left us,"_ he had said, and had noticed the red of fresh blood on his hands, and he had murmured: _"You are stone rolling downhill."_

It was a poor comment, a castigation in bad taste, and yet the words themselves were undeniably true. Murderers, wildmen, sylvans, thieves and the Keepers that chased after them: objects-in-motion, gaining momentum towards devastation. These are the most basic of energies.

Stones

rolling

downhill.

There had been hindsight: _if we had been faster; come sooner; if I hadn't waited for the council's permission_. Naturally, hindsight served no purpose. Of regrets, the Keeper would say only this: that were time as fluid as some of their order believed, he would gladly fumble darkly – less one eye – in the thief's place.

Artemus had no sons; his love, stymied as it was, had to satisfy itself with Garrett.

There was defeat in the way the thief rose the next afternoon, gingerly dressed, touched dazedly at the gauze upon his cheek with shaking fingers. He was oddly sedate whilst remaking the thin, uncomfortable dormitory bed Isolde had ushered them to yestereve, slinging Garrett's legs over their shoulders like a dead man, his boot heel hitting Artemus in the back. _"It is no less clean here than upstairs. Let him lie with the apprentices,"_ Orland had said, unable to keep twinges of dismissal from his voice. Those spectacles, covered in thumbprints and glistening beneath candelabra light, were watching for argument; they waited for their old colleague, covered in the boy's blood, to protest. So Artemus shut his open mouth. _"Lest we all let injuries and misfortune make us forget our chosen place."_

He was not content to merely observe, but this was his place – his place in all things, from glyphs and city influence wars to impetuous boys with ambition that burned their chance of peace away.

"_Your judgment is biased,"_ Orland would say whenever discussion of the thief came up amongst them. That Artemus knew Garrett best, that he could still – though these moments were bitter and brief – persuade their deserter to speak with him did not matter. _"Your opinions are noted, but opinions cannot be trusted when the subject is too close." _

Because Artemus could not kneel at that bedside and hold Garrett, he returned to his quarters, and held those red-sodden robes to his chest. And this is where a father's failings echo, reaching back ten years, faulty and illogical logic: _I should have, I should have, I should have. _

Should have what? Who can know?

Orland's advice was genuine, in many ways – do not draw too near to what concerns you – but perhaps the same mistrust applied when this so-called subject was far away. Even during Garrett's adolescence, Artemus wondered if he was the only one amongst them who did not hate this coal-eyed boy they had recruited from the City streets; he wondered if he was the only one who bothered looking past the thorny exterior, protective pride, occasional ghoulish behavior, conceit that armored up a fragile sense of self-worth – and forgave. The Keeper did not believe his order hated the man, but there was a resentment there… a sullen, deeply-set ill will that they shared for one another.

Whatever the temper towards Garrett may be, it is lasting enough so that when he wakes alone in the cramped citadel bunkroom, there is no one there to help him rise.

Artemus has learned that prudent guardians cannot rush to heel – the risk of insult to both parties is too great. When the paled thief leaves his cot, clothes himself charily, cups the gauze on his face with a mute, half-cognizant sort of despair, his mentor has no comforts. There is only a soft creak of hinges as he slides through the vacant dormitory door late in that day. Artemus's heart jumps with more dread than hope. The old Keeper sits by a study bookshelf just outside, forcing himself to read (pretend to read, at any rate) an Imbris Analects transcript, peripherals betraying yellowed pages. Garrett's footsteps are inaudible against their thin blue rugs, his shadow slight. It does not matter. The letters may as well be illegible scribbles – chicken scratch. He makes no sense of them at all.

Because this rejected mentor knows how it now sits between them, Artemus does not hustle up to lend assistance when the thief totters. He does not comment at how every other step slopes jaggedly to the left. He does not even race over to pick up the candlestick Garrett accidentally knocks from its glass cup when his missing hemisphere of vision fails to note an end table. He remains motionless. And he counts the seconds it takes for a stumble, a misgiving, a surrender.

That hood cannot hide the mess he has made of his existence. Anger cannot hide the wordless fear that shakes him cold when Garrett wakes to find he can no longer walk in a straight line.

The thief, now so muted and displaced in a half-blind Earth, does not even manage to depart this lounge before his boot catches a cobble corner and he falls.

Artemus has no active recollection of making this decision, but somehow he is standing, and then he is seizing fistfuls of Garrett's cowl and holding back before outstretched palms can hit stone floor.

"_Stay here for a while,"_ a good father might have beseeched – a reasonable choice, a rationed hope. _"There is no need to move on so swiftly. You have been badly wounded; you need to rest. Wait until you regain yourself."_

But instead – because he is not a father, and Garrett acts as though he is no man's son – the Keeper hefts him back upright, a cool motion, deceptive power in thinning arms. There is nothing said apart from: "You will get nowhere like this."

Artemus wondered, at times: why a thief? The simple explanation is that this path was a commonsense choice for a youth with the skills Garrett had, but he believes it is more. Perhaps his quest, self-realized or not, is an attempt to force choice and control upon a world which so many have told him is dictated by fate. Perhaps it is a means of insisting upon the substance of sovereignty and freedom. Or, perhaps, this is one man's skewed sense of justice: to have, one must deserve. Garrett began as a poor child, a victim of circumstance; but in all he does, he strives to be the best.

There is no outright hostility or immature tug-of-war – this thief, this boy, does not have the strength of will to glare with one dark eye.

Artemus does not allow such familiar animosity to bother him. The Keeper rolls broken wax sticks out of their way, hazards dotting a narrow hallway, and towards the modest cluster of study chairs he'd just left. No one loiters here at this robust time of day. The scribes are all in their libraries; the students are at lecture halls; their teachers have reported to outdoor training courses beneath a damp September sky. There is only one pupil here, a harried Initiate with frizzled fair hair and the premature wrinkles of future historians; it is a mirror to this veteran scholar. She wisely scurries over just long enough to pick up the broken glass and candle halves, departing with books beneath one arm. They are left to fight in peace.

Artemus does not want to fight today. Arguably, _he_ never does fight – but this matters little to a renegade committed to his banishment. Garrett insists he is a man and needs no aid. He hates that it takes only looking into this Keeper's glassy face to see a boy reflected back.

"_Let me help you,"_ the elder does not say, but his eyes must – because the thief slides one foot unsurely backwards and grumbles: "I don't want your help."

"Then you will fumble in the dark," Atremus warns. And because Garrett will not listen, he does.

The Keeper returns to his cushioned seat. He picks up the discarded tome, place forgotten. And he alternates between reading and staring through ink blotches for two hours – as the one-eyed exile, frustration growing, attempts to right himself again. No ground is gained in this unsteady time. His helplessness wears a thin cloak of fury; he skids, misjudges, has perception falter again and again throughout this practice yard in miniature. Artemus starts out observing through irritated, calculating glances. He ends drowning himself in dense paragraphs to escape this harrowing scene. It is something painful, seeing Garrett – a precise, well-trained tool – flounder like a newborn foal. So much tutelage crippled; so many weeks, months, years that seem erased. It is like taking an arrow puncture to the lung. It makes him feel very heavy. It makes him feel incredibly, irrevocably old.

Artemus has no sons – when he is gone to dust, there will be nothing left of his legacy in this world but Garrett.

And when he cannot bear it anymore, the Keeper stands up.

Garrett is like a lynx with a broken leg. He understands what has happened to him only in the rudimentary sense, but his mind will not analyze it; beneath corporeal agony, dizziness and disorientation, there is a more pressing need to survive. Press on, press on, grit harder – perhaps you will walk through it, heal, make what hobbles you cease to exist. And even with a mouth soured by this strange patina of guilt and aggravation, Artemus can sympathize. For to those like them, beings cut from shadow, this is so far beyond livelihood. It is purpose, worth, necessity. Balance – for him philosophical; for the thief physical – is the cornerstone of life. Every joint and trapping of the boy swears this. A bent knee shows exhaustion. Off-kilter stances, dependent on the walls and furnishings of this untrafficked reading room, reveal weakness that cannot be ignored. Wiry fingers clench a banister until they drain white through fingerless gloves. His chin has dipped – antagonism, shame, a teetering pause on the onslaught of dismay. You cannot see the bandages beneath his drape of hood. He breathes through clenched, hissing teeth. It is stunted wrath. For Garrett, this vicious recess – looking beaten, biting down on nothing until his jaw burns – may as well be crying. Perhaps he grinds so he does not have to.

"What is it you are trying to do?" Artemus asks, voice strangely clear in the high ceiling of this deserted corridor.

It seems like a simple question – simple questions must, at their core, be complex. But beneath every complex question lies a cat's cradle of the simplest ones of all.

Garrett is too furious to figure it out right now. He does not lift his head to look at the Keeper. He sucks a sharp, spiteful intake of air to spit it out again. The pain must be debilitating. His nose is running, Artemus can see; the rage must exit somewhere, and so does here. "What the hell does it look like?"

This tutor is tolerant – dismisses such an unoriginal jab. His posture is unexpressive and eerily flawless. That is a mark of Keepers. They never slouch, stalk, skulk. They do not bend halfway over a railing and cuss vainly when their feet will not lay flat upon foreign terrain. "It looks as though you are leaving us," he notes, curt and bland. "But you must find your balance again first."

Garrett's answer is a mouthful of excess saliva huffed on the floor.

"You may not be approaching your target from the best angle."

"I'm doing fine," is his rebuff – acidic, brittle, but enough of both to show he doesn't truly believe this. The boy very visibly considers forcing himself to shove past this haunt, this reminder of a bygone era he'd rather not revisit. But he is not sure he has the fortitude for it. There have been so many attempts; so many bite-sizes struggles to correct what has been taken from him. _Failure_ has always been too much for Garrett to cope. He will crumble if he trips again.

"Ah. Either you are going about it the wrong way, then, or you're missing much more than something to fill a socket."

"What do you want? What the hell do you _want_, old man? Is this a sermon, a lesson plan, or are you just here to taunt me? You taught me better? You _told me so_?" the thief snarls, clawing to wound, but swiping short. He knows Artemus better than that. Then, a forfeit: "Go away."

"I won't. Your situation is plain to me, but until you make sense of it, neither one of us can go anywhere. That is where we are here."

Garrett says nothing – but with no speech, he does not disagree.

"You have lost an eye, thief," the Keeper explains, for neither of them can use sugary tonics to salve real lesions. That is the effect of this order. Ducts ooze uselessly within the void beside his sharp nose. "Your perspective has been altered. You cannot regain it – not as it was – but that does not mean everything else about you is changed." Garrett whips up his face only long enough to sear Artemus with a contemptuous gaze for this obvious, unilluminating logic. One slate iris slices – its redness conveys much the tongue does not. "You have another to see with. Why try to look through what is no longer there?"

"You're talking in riddles. I hate that about you people. You always talk in these damned convoluted-"

"Do you think you have doomed your vocation, Garrett?"

He is silent; it is the greatest fear he did not want to permit.

Artemus proceeds. "You have not, if so. This has not affected your skills. This has dashed neither your talents nor your potential. You fall because you compensate for something you have lost."

Impatience – he has always been hindered by impatient lunges for momentum. "How does this—"

"I am about to show you. Stand up. Properly. Face me," he instructs; confirming there is still some sliver of student left within, the thief does. His countenance is a mess of vehemence, humiliation and bloody cotton. Pus and aimless tears give inner layers a seething, brownish hue. It is difficult to see. But Artemus looks. "You have lost nothing. It is all still there; the world is still what it has always been. So there is nothing to relearn, Garrett. Here. I will make it clear for you."

To prove this, the Keeper extends his palm – long, flat, perfectly halted fingers on a master craftsman's hand. Aged bones have begun to protrude beneath shriveling skin. The younger "master" – for that is how he fashions himself – watches: wary, resentful, curious. Magicks or monks' wisdom – both come freely from Order counselors. "When your mind expects to see things around you in a certain way," Artemus begins, and slowly draws his arm before Garrett's keen left cheek to his sightless right. The single eye follows as far as it can. "It attempts to correct your body when there is no correcting to be done. That is why you favor this side. Look."

With no warning – no assurance – the gradual back-and-forth movement transforms into a strike. Knuckles swing at the thief's unhurt half as though to clip his jaw. But before a punishing hit connects – when it moves past that invisible line of the youth's thwarted vision – Artemus drops cold. This does not factor. Garrett recoils for a blow that does not come; he demonstrates a point.

The mentor folds his digits. It is a class complete. They disappear beneath long sleeves. "Here is what happened. You perceived my hand with your present eye, thought to know the arc, and assumed what the other would see. But you and I both know that assumption is not a component to balance." He offers no metaphors – there is no place in this reduced, practical relationship for proverbs or quotes from ancient texts. "You did not try to consider all possibilities; your brain still tries to rely upon sight that is not there. You must tell it to stop. Judge your situation from what you _know_, not what you believe you _ought_ to know, and the rest will fall naturally into line."

"If it were that easy, why-" But as Garrett has distilled insolence over these many years running, Artemus has made an art out of interrupting his disrespectful pupil. He does it for his own good, for brevity, for the sake of not allowing an impertinent child's spines to hurt.

"Your mind does what it thinks it must," he pardons. "It believes things that are not true out of a want to keep you safe. All you must do is accept the slant your life has taken. Learn to forget what your absent eye ought to see. Ignore what you feel there should be and focus your sight on what there _is_. You may discover that there is not so much missing from your picture, after all."

There is no need to repeat. There is no need to hover and stack advice upon ears that dearly need it but a mouth that will never confess to this. Artemus picks the abandoned book from his equally abandoned chair, slides it back into a shelf, and says nothing more. He does not bid _good evening_ or _good luck_. He leaves Garrett to falter there – humbled, bristling, invidious as ever. He walks away, a personal bravery that looks like uncaring, from a work-in-progress.

That is the way it must be.

The thief does not return to bed that night. He walks the dim foyer, focused, downcast, unspoken, frightfully determined. _Close end, far end, back and back again_. You can hear the soles of his feet like clockwork. They are a steady metronome of willpower; they never cease.

In the morning – some hours later, when Artemus finds himself dumbly wandering towards that dormitory with two steaming coffee mugs in his hands, a kindness offering he already _knows_ will be refused, but he brews anyway – Garrett has found his footing, and has left them.

The Order teaches this: balanced does not mean unchanging. To be rigid and resist change in want of stagnant _constants_ reflects a human need for control. Every acolyte knows it is folly to believe you are ever in complete control. A thousand forces, some seen and some forever hidden, alter the course of any single living thing. To deny is not to stop this. The answer is not pitching anchor and forsaking all, shutting eyes, plugging ears, for even solid walls are subject to slow yawns of soil and rain. No. As wind shifts the ripples of sea, you must acknowledge these gusts that drive your life – face them fluidly, respond, adjust. You must move in new directions when they come to guide you.

Prophecies preach what they will. Sometimes Artemus thinks Garrett is less of a catalyst and more of a key on a string. He twists in the draft. He tempts disaster willingly, with few lifelines. He scales barricades as they crumble down. He perceives intrigue, quarterly reports, manipulations plied because the Keeper's goals are to maneuver him; he sees mistrust and derision where there is only an old father's duty to love.

But this shrewd teacher does not expect too much. Artemus has learned, beyond all else, restraint – how to travel on violent tides, and to accept the things you cannot change.

The thief learns quickly to see again. But there will, he thinks, always be a blind spot between what Garrett thinks is true and what _is_.

Young fire, young rancor, young ambitions with no temperance. This young man may never relearn how to accept help – especially not from a furrowed, fading face in his past. The Thief is singular. He chooses odium; he chooses to walk an old, cracked road on his own. But whether he denies or not – no matter if he believes, admits, wants it – this castoff boy is not, was not, will never be alone. When he roams astray, there are worried eyes watching. When he loses his path in the dark – for there is much of it in this bleak corner of their world – there is a candle burning to mark the way he came. And when Garrett barks and shouts his hatreds, spurs pushed outward from within, there will always be one voice that does not throw them back.

When he trips, Artemus is there to catch him.

Garrett may not always see it.

But he always will.

* * *

><p><strong>That's it! Thanks again for reading. I may write more on Artemus in the future, but for now, I'm like Garrett: rednightmare is done. (Take that for what you will.)<strong>


End file.
